A Tale of Two Preppers

by Susan Gregersen

  “Well, it’s just something I heard floating around. To buy precious metals. I’m not sure it’s necessary though. I’ve heard of other investments that might be better,” Jeff stammered.

  “Are you a prepper?” the man asked him.

  “A what?” Jeff asked, startled.

  “A prepper is someone who prepares for the future, especially for surviving disasters or wars or any bad thing that might come along.” The man leaned back against the shelves behind him.

  “You mean a survivalist? NO! I mean, the government isn’t all that great, in fact they’re a bunch of corrupt liars, but I don’t even own a gun and I’m not going to crawl in a hole and be paranoid and all that!” Jeff was quick to defend himself.

  The man chuckled. “I know, I know. That’s not was I’m talking about. Preppers are all around us. They’re people who want to be able to take care of themselves and their families, and maybe a few others, if something goes wrong.

  “It could be anything from losing their jobs, to earthquake or other disaster where it might take a while for help to arrive, if ever; to war or economic collapse. Nothing wild or crazy about wanting to be prepared, to have supplies on hand to get through those things.

  “Even the government puts out recommendations of supplies people should keep on hand, such as 3-days’ worth of food and other necessities like medicine and flashlights.”

  Jeff remembered the news article Jeannie had showed him, the one about foods to keep on hand for an emergency. That had been main-stream news, not a wacko website. Not that Jeannie would be on wacko-websites.

  “Um, okay, maybe that’s what I’m thinking about. I’m not really sure. It’s new to me. But it seems to keep coming up around me.” Jeff sighed. “Two of the guys at my office were having a debate on barter items vs. precious metals.”

  “Yep, that’s a hot one. Probably the most debated part of prepping. Other than how much ammo to have on hand!” he chuckled. “In my opinion, if you’re just getting started, get a few small gold coins, but spend most of your money getting the things YOU will need, first. Worry about barter later. But at least with a few gold coins, if the SHTF before you’re ready, you’ll have something to barter with.”

  “What about guns and ammunition?” Jeff asked.

  “Well…first I’d worry about food, although defense is an important area to prepare for. Do some research, find other preppers to talk to, go to some gun ranges. Don’t just go out and buy a gun. Don’t just get your advice from gun shop owners! They’re good people and some can be honestly helpful, but the bottom line is everyone has a different opinion, and they’re trying to sell a product. Gun dealers, in general, can be trusted, more than a lot of other kinds of business owners.”

  “I appreciate your advice,” said Jeff, “and that you aren’t trying to talk me into spending a lot of money on YOUR product. Says to me that you must be one of those trustworthy business people too. I’ll take a few of whatever small coins you recommend.”

  A short while later Jeff left the shop with a small envelope in his pocket. In it were half a dozen 1/10th oz gold coins. The last words of the shopkeeper rang in his head: ‘do some research before you start spending a lot of money!”

  He walked back into his office with a lighter step. His secretary looked at him suspiciously and said “good lunch?”. He smiled at her and said, “very!” She scowled and looked back at her work. He wondered if she thought he was having an affair or something! Somehow that amused him!

  Back in the apartment Jeannie stopped for lunch. She wished there was something in the cupboard because she suddenly felt tired of going down to the coffee shop for a bowl of soup or a salad. When she reached the ground floor she went outside and walked to the next block where she’d noticed a small ethnic market. The smell of curry and other spices greeted her as she entered, and she felt her spirits lift.

  The shopkeeper asked if he could help her, but she smiled and said no. She wandered among the narrow aisles, looking at names and labels. Knowing she had no way to cook those kind of things, she kept going until she reached the canned goods. That, at least, she figured she could heat in the microwave. They had paper plates and bowls at home. She selected a few cans, then spotted canned fruit. She remembered her Mom serving applesauce and peaches and fruit cocktail out of cans. She picked up one of each.

  “Miss? Would you like a basket?” came a voice near her. She jumped and turned. The man was holding out a basket with a handle. She thanked him, placed her cans in it, and hung it over her arm.

  Near the back of the store she picked up a few bottles of juice and a carton of milk. She walked back to the counter and set the basket down.

  “Find everything you were looking for?” asked the clerk.

  “Yes. Um, no! I mean, I was wondering if you have crackers? The kind you eat with soup?” Jeannie said.

  The man pointed and Jeannie walked over to look. There were the square kind and the little round kind. She picked up the square kind and returned to the counter, paid for her groceries, and left.

  Humming a happy tune she returned to the apartment and hit her first stumbling block. There was no can opener in the apartment. She stood there, stunned. Leaving the food on the counter she turned and left the apartment. First she went to the sundry shop on the first floor and asked if they had a can opener.

  “A what???” asked the girl as she tapped her long, painted nails on the counter and tilted her head, with it’s red and blue streaked hair.

  “Never mind” Jeannie murmured and headed for the coffee shop. One of the regular waitresses came up to her with a smile and started to ask “soup or salad”, and stopped.

  “You look troubled today, honey! Everything okay?” She led Jeannie to a table near the window and sat down across from her.

  “Well, I probably shouldn’t admit this, but I went out and bought some cans of soup. I was going to heat one in the microwave but I don’t have an opener to open the can!” Jeannie said glumly.

  The waitress, Gloria, leaned over the table and whispered, “now, why did you go do that? You’re not having trouble with money, are you? Are you or Jeff worried about getting laid off? Do you have savings to live on?”

  “No! Oh no, nothing like that. Everything is fine, as far as I know. I mean, my editing jobs have dropped off some but I’m still getting enough. Jeff doesn’t seem worried about his job. I just feel like…oh, I don’t know. Like something is missing. Like…like…I guess like I should be thinking about things like food and cooking,” Jeannie said.

  Gloria sat back with a face about to burst. “You’re pregnant!” she exclaimed.

  Jeannie was stunned. She stared at Gloria unable to move or think.

  “No! I’m not! Really, I’m not! And I haven’t even thought about it in a while!” Jeannie could tell Gloria was still skeptical.

  She went on. “Okay, it’s like this. I read a news article that said people should keep food in their pantries in case of emergency. I’m not turning into one of those crazy people who are paranoid and fearful about plots and such, I just thought it WOULD be nice to have some things on hand. Sometimes I get tired of the same old take-out food.

  “And I remember when the power went out last winter and we all had to come down here and eat cold soup and salad-fixings while we waited. The whole time, I kept thinking about all the things I COULDN’T have, and I craved the weirdest things, like candy bars and cinnamon graham crackers and canned ham! It was so weird.”

  “Tell you what, bring the can of soup down and I’ll slip it into the kitchen and open it for you!” Gloria whispered in a conspiratorial voice. “I know what you mean, in a way. Sometimes I just have to cook my own meal or I start feeling like I’m losing my roots. And by the way, during that power outage? I craved Nacho chips and canned sardines! How weird is that?” She slid off the chair and headed off to take the order from another group of diners.

  Jeannie went back up for the soup, placing it in her handbag and return
ing to the coffee shop. Gloria, as promised, slipped off to the kitchen and returned a minute later with the opened can. The lid floated on top of the soup. Jeannie took it and looked helplessly at her handbag. Then she and Gloria both giggled.

  Jeannie shrugged and carried the open can in her hand. A few people looked at her quizzically but she acted like nothing was out of the ordinary, just saying the usual hellos as she passed!

  Back in the apartment she poured the soup in a cardboard bowl and placed it in the microwave. Heating it was a breeze. She’d often brought soup back up from the coffee shop to eat in front of the TV and had to reheat it.

  She opened the crackers and sat at the table for her first “home made” meal in years. She poured juice into a wine glass, then put the rest of the bottle and the others in the refrigerator. The cans of soup and fruit, and the crackers, went into one of the cupboards. Then she got back to work.

  That evening on his way home, Jeff was pondering what to pick up for dinner. He was thinking pizza when he stepped off the bus, but then he spotted a market and thought about Jeannie’s sandwiches. Well, turn about was fair play. He headed inside and looked for the freezer case. He picked out a pizza, then picked up two bowls of packaged salads and a bag of rolls. His mouth watered as he pictured garlic rolls.

  He walked in the door of the apartment and cheerfully showed Jeannie what he had. She looked at him in amazement but seemed pleased. She helped him read the package to see how to bake the pizza, and they turned the oven to the right temperature.

  “Uh, oh. It says to ‘place pizza on baking sheet’. We don’t have one.” Jeff said.

  “I think it’s okay to lay it on the oven rack. We used to do that in college in our toaster oven,” Jeannie said. “At least it’ll all fit in the oven at once! We used to have to break them in half and bake it one half at a time!” They slid the pizza onto the rack. So far, so good.

  “We don’t have any salad dressings, and these little salads didn’t come with any!” Jeannie turned the plastic-wrapped bowls over and back upright. Jeff didn’t know it, but there was a basket of packets near the salad display where you were supposed to pick the kind of dressing you liked.

  “I guess we’ll have to eat them plain. I just realized that we don’t have any butter, either. I was going to make garlic bread like my Mother used to make. We have garlic salt but no butter. I guess we’re just going to eat plain rolls!” Jeff said.

  They put paper plates on the table, used a knife to cut the pizza, and were ready to sit down to a meal they had worked together to prepare. Jeff went to the fridge for the wine and stood staring into the open fridge.

  “What’s this?” he asked, pointing to the juice and milk. “Are you getting all nuts because of that article you read?” He’d been planning to show Jeannie the gold coins after they ate, but now he felt an unreasonable feeling of betrayal that she would buy all this stuff without talking about it with him. He knew that was silly, because he never monitored her spending and had no idea what she spent on clothes or her hair or other things.

  “I don’t always feel like stopping work to go out to get something to drink during the day. I thought it would be nice to have some things on hand. A few bottles of juice and a carton of milk is hardly ‘going nuts’!” she said defensively. She hoped he didn’t open the cupboard and see the cans and crackers.

  They ate in silence. After cleaning up, they watched a TV show, then went down to the gym for their “run”. Jeannie tried smiling at Jeff a few times but he seemed preoccupied.

  CHAPTER THREE

  After Jeff left for work the next day Jeannie got the food out of the cupboard. She set it on the table and looked at it. “Where to put it?” she wondered. Her eyes roamed around the kitchen and living room. A pen on the floor poked out from under the couch and she went over and picked it up and laid it on the coffee table. A thoughtful look came over her face.

  She pulled the coffee table away from the couch and got down on the floor. Running her hands under the couch she felt the space under there. She pulled it out a couple times a year to vacuum behind it and remembered there was a lot of space under it.

  Bringing the cans and box of crackers over, she pushed them under the couch, all the way to the back. Even if you got down on the floor to pick something up you couldn’t see them. She walked to the far end of the apartment and looked across at it. Nope, she still couldn’t see them.

  Happy, she went to work at her computer. Taking a break a few hours later she typed in “How to store food” on a search engine. She came up with several websites telling how to can or freeze food, but that wasn’t quite what she was looking for.

  One site had a “savvy shopper” list of ways to save money while buying lots of food. She clicked on a link to a site that said “long-term food storage, how do I…” and started reading, and was lost for hours absorbing information.

  It was a forum with lots of different subjects. Everywhere she turned, she felt like she was finding all the things she wanted to know, and she hadn’t even realized what the questions were! Hours later she leaned back and drew a breath of air.

  In wonder, she realized she’d missed lunch. She didn’t want to stop now. She poured a glass of juice, returned to her computer and made a “username” and “password”, and became a member of a sight called “prepared society.com”.

  Jeff was in a meeting with his boss and some prospective clients when he slid his hand into his pocket and felt the envelope of gold coins. He didn’t understand why he clammed up and felt funny last night when he’d seen the juice Jeannie bought. He guessed he didn’t like her knowing things he didn’t. He felt out of control with all this new “prepping” stuff floating around in his head, and he didn’t even know what he should be doing. He didn’t know where to start.

  His mind kept wandering and he had a hard time answering the questions directed to him. His boss gave him a stern look, then seemed to avoid bringing Jeff into the conversation. After the meeting he asked to speak to Jeff. He asked Jeff what happened in there, and Jeff apologized. He begged off by saying he didn’t feel well.

  “Well, take something for it and get back to work!” he said, dismissing Jeff.

  He stared at his computer, brought up google to search for an answer he needed for a client who would be coming the next morning, but as he started to type, he typed “preppers” instead. He expected it to kick out a message saying “no results found”, and stared goggle-eyed at the list of thousands of results!

  “Holy cow! Where do I start?” he asked in amazement.

  “Start on what?” a voice in the doorway asked. Jeff dropped the screen but not before the man saw what he’d searched. It was one of the guys who had been part of the conversation by the coffee pot the other day, the one who thought other barter items were better than precious metals. Jeff almost patted the envelope or gold coins in his pocket, but stopped.

  “Jeff, you’re searching prepping? What do you want to know? I didn’t even know you knew the word!” he said.

  Jeff was tongue-tied for a minute. Then he cleared his throat and said, “Well…I’ve heard it floating around and I was curious. Dave, I heard what you and Bill said in the lounge the other day, about precious metals and barter items.”

  Dave closed the door and pulled a chair close to Jeff’s desk.

  “Bring the screen back up. Maybe I can point you to some good places to start,” he said. Jeff did so, and Dave reached over for the mouse and started scrolling. “Here. This is my favorite,” he said as he clicked on it. He gave Jeff a quick tutorial on how the site worked and showed him the lists of categories.

  “It’s the best site I know of, though there are several similar ones. This one, though, feels like family, and it covers a lot of the real day-to-day needs of a prepper.”

  “Thanks, Dave. I’ve really been stumped about how to get started. You know, like what should I buy, what should I be doing.” He thought of the gold coins again.